Candy is either the best or second-best part of a kid’s Halloween, depending on how much they love costumes. But what do you do when your kid brings home mountains of gut-busting, tooth-rotting sugar? Here are your options for shrinking the pile without sucking all the fun out of the holiday.

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One day of gorging on candy won’t lead to health problems or bad habits. What kids eat year-round matters more than any one day. The real problem is, any proficient trick-or-treater will come home with far more than one bellyful of candy. You can only shrug and say “Eh, it’s Halloween” so many times before what you have is not a special occasion but a new habit.

So if you’re inclined to let your child gorge, make it clear that the free-for-all only lasts a day or two. Two days sounds optimal to me: on the first day, they won’t feel compelled to eat everything; by the second day, the best pieces will be gone and their enthusiasm may begin to wane.

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If you’d like to teach kids to question the tradition of stuffing themselves with candy, do like Yoni Freedhof and ask them, ahead of time, how many pieces of candy it takes to make the holiday feel special. On Halloween night, they get to eat that many—and you can expect them to pick their favorites. The rest can await the next phase of your plan.

Dole Out the Stash

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Once the novelty of owning a massive amount of candy has worn off, fun size Butterfingers make fine treats for lunchboxes. Consider allowing a piece or two every day in early November. (If your kids are too young to obey this rule without help, and you’d rather not prolong the agony of being the gatekeeper, skip to the next section.)

Younger kids will forget, pretty quickly, exactly how much candy they had. While I would never condone stealing from your child, a parental, say, “candy tax” may be taken with nobody being the wiser. When the supply dwindles to the lowest-tier candies, or when the child’s attention wanes, consider dumping or donating the rest.

Enlist the Kid’s Help to Get Rid of It

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If you’re more the type to rip band-aids off, you may prefer to get the candy out of the house ASAP. With a good enough deal, you can get the kids excited about helping you. Here are some of the ways to cooperatively disappear the loot:

Buy It. Just straight up purchase the candy from your kid. You can place a bid for the whole bag, or set up a buyback program with list prices: say, ten cents for Smarties and a quarter for mini chocolate bars. Or, set up a calories-to-cents exchange rate to sneak a math and nutrition lesson into the deal.

Swap It. If you’d prefer something more magical than a buyout, tell the kids that the Tooth Fairy’s sister the Switch Witch will be flying around to exchange candy for toys while they sleep. If your child has already started dreaming of holiday wish lists, and has picked out their favorite candy from the pile anyhow, chances are they’ll gladly make the swap.

Donate It. Keep an eye out for local candy collections, often organized by schools or dentist’s offices. Your kid can bring in their candy, sometimes for a reward, and it gets sent to charities like Operation Gratitude, which sends care packages to soldiers. If no trade-in program exists in your area, consider donating directly.

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The key to all of these strategies is giving your child some decision making power. If they don’t choose to donate or swap, you’re just confiscating the candy. That’s your right as a parent, but not the best way to build trust. On the other hand, if they choose to give it away, they’re learning to balance their hunger for candy against other benefits for their lives and others’.

Try Creative Solutions

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Besides the straightforward scenarios above, there are a few more ways to have fun with halloween candy in ways that make it go away:

While we’re talking about creative solutions, don’t forget that there’s no law that you have to take your kids trick-or-treating. If you can get together a few like-minded families for a party on Halloween night, that’s a fun tradition that allows for plenty of treats without the logistical problems afterwards.

Finally, you can do your part to reduce the amount of candy that goes into the Halloween ecosystem by giving out toys and party favors instead of being another house doling out packets of sugar. This strategy is also friendly to kids with food allergies. Try noisemakers, tiaras, or bubbles in the shape of zombie fingers.

When it comes to the candy your kids bring home, every family is different, so what works for somebody else’s kids might feel too controlling—or too freewheeling—for yours. By choosing the best strategies for you, Halloween can still be fun without turning into a month-long candy marathon.